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Matteo Cainer

Don't take no for an answer
Idea, Concept
"The Fountainhead"

Notebook on Cities and Clothes - Wim Wenders

After reviewing Notebook on Cities and Clothes, I believe that it is a documentary not only on Yamamoto, but also on Wim Wenders himself, who indicates his own thoughts of life and the society as a director. Wim Wenders presents both of their ideas by using picture-in-picture and frames of different qualities especially.

First of all, lots of frames are shown by picture-in-picture, which is rarely seen on the screen. When the magnetic voice-off, which expresses the director’s mind, mentions one Yamamoto’s favourite book, the lens focuses on the book turned by Wim Wenders while in the monitor which is put top-left to the book, Yamamoto is turning the same book page by page in the same speed and telling his feelings about it. The things living in the screen do not exist, nor do the feelings told by others. What we need is touching, reading and feeling the things really by ourselves. What’s more, we should also display the things in a straight way.

Secondly, when representing the fashion show, Wim Wenders puts two monitors under the T-stage on the screen, and that makes it possible to see the moving models on Yamamoto’s clothes, the preparation of the show and the talk of Yamamoto about his design idea at the same time. The frame implies that the idea and the manufacture form the foundation of a work. So putting cause and effect on the same page may make the thing more persuasive.

Many frames were taken by an old 35mm and DV or were got directly by shooting at the monitor, so they are coarse and not true to the original color, and that make me doubt whether the film was made in late 1980s. Together with the revolving or inverted shooting, these unintentional fragments are intentionally combined with the rest regular parts. Here, Wim Wenders well organizes the proportion of regular and alternative, just like Yamamoto inspirationally cut out two pockets on a well-arranged dress. How to balance the plan and impulse is also a question for me.

Werckmeister Harmonies - Béla Tarr

Werckmeister Harmonies must be the movie with the fewest shots I’ve ever seen. The monochrome frames and excessive long paced shots, that the movie is famous for, are contrary to the regular Hollywood movies nowadays. Béla Tarr, as a consummate director, arranges the settings, the music and the pictures in a perfect way. What fascinate me most are the paced shots used in the entire film.

Generally, long paced shots appear no more than 5 times in a movie, which are assembled by montage for the main part. A director usually prefers using montage to paced shot because the former is regarded to be more dramatic and efficient, while the latter is boring. But this movie makes me ponder over the use of long paced shot all over again. As said in Martin Jay’s Scopic Regimes of Modernity, our vision is dynamic, jumping from one focal point to another. It follows the logic of the Gaze rather than the Glance. So the montage is more like the Glance while the paced shot like the Gaze. Why Béla Tarr choose the way of looking which is not coherent with our vision habit? In my opinion, it is because the camera takes the place of our eyes when we are in front of the screen, and that makes the Gaze possible. These long paced shots in Werckmeister Harmonies display the process of the story in an unrealistic way for the audience, who were indelibly impressed by the uncommon experience. From this point of view, the long paced shot is more fantastic.

What’s more, there are still three details in my mind. Firstly, as the leading role walking down the road for nearly 200 meters, the camera keeps on focusing on him with the same focal length and perspective without any omitting. It does show the distance sincerely. Secondly, the overall view of the crowed square is not revealed by Wide-Angle or bird-eye, but by the paced shot following the actor’s track, and that makes the understanding of the environment more limpid. Finally, when the actor steps into the track, the shot will continues focusing on the face of the container, and that strengthens the suspense.

However, these methods of presenting could work only with moving pictures, but how to translate them into a picture’s way?

Labyrinths - Jorge Lois Borges

Fact & Fiction
I still haven’t quite acclimatized to Jorge Luis Borges’s works. Once you read the fiction, you will know that the entire story, character and setting are fabled, but you can’t help yourself regarding these stories as real. The artificial world called Tlon, in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, as a fictitious planet, is too pure to be questioned but at the same time has totally no convictions. I stay in the conflict of reality and fantasy, and fall into the trap which is elaborately organized by the author. The state of flux between fact and fiction gives me a brand-new feeling of reading and also a different way of thinking.

Rules
After reading several works from Labyrinths, I find the Borges sets specific rules in certain fiction, like one lock with one key. Only by reading in the particular way, could the audience understand the real meaning of the article. The game between the writer and the readers will make the readers attach themselves more to the story, and produce deeper influences on them. The key point is the participation.

Elastic Time
In a regular way of thinking, time flows at a constant speed which is usually measured by second, minute, hour and so on in our daily life. Meanwhile, we say “days drag on for year” maybe result from anxiety or worries. After so many years of education in materialism, I have no respect for the true feeling of myself, and just act as a surveyor, who treats the things in a “scientific” way. Why could the time stop for one year for the protagonist in The Secret Miracle? It is made by the God or himself? I know little about religious issues, but I prefer the latter instinctively. Maybe everyone have their own time which flexes in individual way. So I just need to be true to my self.

Pluralism
This is not the first time I met the Parallel Universes, but this is the first time I realize this way of thinking could be brought to my work after reading The Gardens of Forking Paths. Ordinarily, we have a series of process which form a tread in order to achieve an aim. But what if we make the aim not to be a determinate one, then the result will come out to be a net. The architecture may perform in diverse ways with multifarious choices of people, not limited by the designer in a fixed way.

The Opposite
Have you ever tried to assume the character of the opposition of who you are? If you were a murder, describe in the victim’s way; if you were a mother, narrate in the child’s way; if you were a boss, express in the clerk’s way. We should not only put ourselves in someone’s place, but also illustrate the fact, the feeling, and the notion in the opposite. It’s easy to think but difficult to describe, and that means you really put yourself in.

There are still lots of works I can’t quite understand. Read it again some day.

Daniel Libeskind - Chamber Works

Inside & Outside

The first time I saw the set of 28 drawings done by Daniel Libeskind, I tried to get the information by reading not just seeing. However, I could only describe the drawings as something having a kind of uncertain relationship with Architecture, partly maybe because I’ve already known Daniel Libeskind who used to engage in education of architecture as an architect.I have the same question “Why, for example, are these works architectural and not sculptural or simply concrete poetry”, mentioned in Peter Eisenman’s representation of the limit, though the lines and points could be found as fragments of some traditional architectural drawings. Without giving out the answer, Peter Eisenman sees the issue in a unique way:

“This is similar to the question; at what point is a shelter a 'house', or when is a structure 'architecture' and not merely building. Or in what context is a line drawn on the ground or lines on a piece of paper architectural rather than graphic or sculptural. Do they relate to architecture by a function: defining outside from inside, sacred from profane, shelter from not shelter? To invoke 'architectural' by a function is again to seek limits from inside, a return to form in a causal relationship to function.”

Although I’ve been involved myself in Architecture no more than 5 years, I find what we mostly focus on is the culture, function and the appearance. Actually, under the education which still hasn’t totally understood the Modernity, only function and appearance is cared about in the judgment system. As a result, we cannot define architecture without the function, which drag us in design. Till now I realize that maybe we have been tied in the small circle all the time, defining outside from inside complacently.

So I jump out of the old definition of architecture and read the chamber works again with the new conception called “Not-Architecture” which also brought by Peter Eisenman. As he said, a 'not-architecture' would be intimate with architecture, would know it, would contain it, as architecture would know and contain a 'not-architecture'; it would constitute a relationship to being by not being. I regard the ‘not-architecture’ as a new interpretation of architecture.

The chamber works has been accomplished for 26 years, but it may have some affinity with the “Living Architecture”. I’ll end this topic by the description in Daniel Libeskind’s unoriginal signs.

“This work in search of architecture has discovered no permanent structure, no constant form, and no universal type. I have realized that the result of this journey in search of the 'essentials' undermines, in the end, the very premise of their existence. Architecture is neither on the inside nor the outside. It is not a given nor a physical fact. It has no history and it does not follow fate. What emerges in differentiated experience is architecture as an index of the relationship between what was and what will be. Architecture as nonexistent reality is a symbol, which in the process of consciousness leaves a trail of hieroglyphs in space and time that touch equivalent depth of unoriginality.”